


Rank Outsiders

by ljs



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-12
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-04 02:03:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4122016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ljs/pseuds/ljs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Mayor, after Buffy's high school graduation, Giles is at loose ends. He goes to Los Angeles to acquire a book, but to get it he has to deal with a certain young Wolfram and Hart lawyer.</p><p>Acknowledgement: the song "Tumbling Dice," popularized by the Rolling Stones.</p><p>Canon-compliant, mostly.... <br/>Written for the 2015 Summer of Giles festival.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rank Outsiders

The bar was called the Two Unicorns.

Giles shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at the neon sign. Its luminescence fluttered and hummed, and with every fluctuation the silhouette of two horned animals came into focus and disappeared, with the accompanying sound of distant hoofbeats.

Right – magic, not lighting problems. This Hollywood club was definitely the place.

After the Mayor had been defeated, Giles had realized that he needed more books. Of course he _always_ needed more books – he had been a librarian, after all – but in this case he needed to access _The Two Marks of Hell,_ a magical bestiary of 1789. Its material on Snakes (demon-hosts, etc etc) would have been useful earlier in the fight against the Mayor, but now he needed to check his own draft of a monograph on the topic with the most compelling historical data.

He needed to go.

Lucia Alleman, his contact at the Huntingdon Library in Pasadena, had sent him to the Clark Library, where his thankfully not yet expired Council letter of introduction had gotten him to see Horace Wilding, eighteenth-century literary scholar who was, in fact, from the eighteenth century. (Nasty curse, cast in 1799, reputedly by a young witch with the surname of Austen.) Wilding had said that the volume had been… acquired… the previous year by a young lawyer who worked for Wolfram and Hart.

Giles, still standing in front of the club door, shivered at the memory. He didn’t really wish to negotiate with one of Hell’s attorneys, but… well, needs must when demons drove. Why the lawyer wanted to meet here, however –

The door slammed open. A bouncer – Visick demon, nasty, with chains swinging from his horned hands – filled the opening, surrounded by smoke, noise, and the squawking of a truly awful singer.

“Here for the open mic, human?” the Visick snarled.

Giles internally sighed. Then, with a swagger and accent he’d revisited after that sodding band-candy incident, he said, “Yeah. Got a table?”

“Maybe. We got a rule, though. You enter once you tell me a true thing.” The demon cracked his fingers, as if assuming Giles wouldn’t and mayhem would be thus forthcoming.

“There’s a Hellmouth in Sunnydale,” Giles said tersely. 

The demon’s chains rattled, then, “Right this way, sir.”

The Two Unicorns, as Giles saw at first disdainful glance, would have given Willy’s a good game in the Disgusting Demon Den league. The medusa-haired creature onstage was singing some horrible song about blood and guts; three drunk Chaos demons (not _his_ kind of chaos) were nodding their dripping antlers to some tune only they could hear, because it bloody well wasn’t to the singing; the three tables of vampires in the corner were playing Quarters with their pints of blood.

But there, right by the stage at a table for two, sat a young man in an expensive suit. On the table in front of him was a dagger – one of the presumed-lost daggers of Hecate, Giles realized – and a book.

“I know where I’m going,” Giles said to the mini-skirted demon hostess, and made his way through the vileness to the table.

The young lawyer turned his head at Giles’ approach – just as the medusa-haired singer didn’t hit her high note. The man’s wince was faint but real. Then, through the applause, he pushed out the other chair with his well-shod foot. “Rupert Giles, I presume,” he said, in a smooth, educated voice but with an underlying accent that Giles tentatively identified as… one of those states in the middle of this benighted country. Oklahoma, Texas, something like that.

Giles didn’t sit. “And you are?”

“The man Horace Wilding sent you to see,” the lawyer said. Then, would-be charm: “I’m Lindsey McDonald. You know who I work for.”

“Yes,” Giles said, and sat down. When the server (another demon in a mini-skirt, but this one a male) arrived, Giles ordered a Scotch.

“Fine choice. I like a good bourbon myself,” McDonald said. He raised his glass in a mocking toast, and then drank.

Giles didn’t say anything. The club was quieter now, except for the dripping of the antlers and the squabbling of the vampires and the clash of glasses in the back. He let the silence flow for a few moments, and the lawyer let it go, with only a flash or two of a private smile.

Then, after Giles’ drink was delivered, McDonald leaned in. Confidentially, huskily, he said, “So how’s your Slayer doing, Mr Giles?”

 _His_ Slayer. Apparently the Wolfram and Hart records hadn’t been updated after the, er, everything. “I don’t believe that’s any of Wolfram and Hart’s business,” Giles said, and took a drink.

“Man, you just lay it all out, don’t you?” McDonald laughed, his accent thicker on these words. “You know it could be my business, right?”

Giles reached out and touched _The Two Marks of Hell_. The binding was… oh God, it was probably demon-skin, possibly Dragoic, possibly something worse. The smell of brimstone was stronger when he touched it.

He shouldn’t be here.

He said, “I’m not going to get the book, no matter what I attempt to trade, am I?”

McDonald said, on a cold, cold smile, “Well, buddy, you’re smart as paint. You’re probably not. But…”

The compere of the open mic night – a succubus, Giles noted in passing, long-haired and long-legged and lascivious in the last degree – glided onstage at that moment. She went to the microphone, caressing it up and down before saying, “Who else wishes to try a song for us?”

“But you look like you sing,” McDonald said, as if that had been his intention all along. “Why not give it a go, and if you’re really good, we can maybe do a deal.”

Giles considered. He’d taken up his guitar again recently. But singing in a bar like this was risky. He looked again at McDonald’s smile, and then at McDonald’s hand, outstretched on the table next to the book, tapping out an odd rhythm.

Those looked very like calluses from a guitar. Which suggested –

“I’ll sing if you do,” Giles said.

McDonald stilled. His eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Because if you sing with me, I’ll know this isn’t a trap.”

A long, long pause. One of the vampires across the room snarled out something in…Bulgarian, possibly? Someone else at that table called for more blood. The compere took the microphone in one beautifully taloned hand and began to walk toward them. “Lindsey, _cher,_ ” she said. “Is it you?”

“It’s us. Singing,” McDonald said shortly. “Don’t say our names.”

As she laughed and then danced into the shadows at the back of the stage, McDonald rose and then Giles followed, half-amused to find himself a good deal taller. They both jumped up into the smoke-hazed spotlight.

No, not smoke, Giles realized. Magic.

The compere came back with a second microphone and a palm-sized crystal. She eyed McDonald and then Giles. “You, stranger in suede,” she purred, and dropped the crystal into Giles’s hand. “Let’s see what you can do.”

McDonald’s eyes narrowed again. “You Council types don’t do magic very well, right?”

And Giles, tired after months of professional and personal disasters, said in his old voice, “Nah. Do your bloody research,” and then lifted the crystal almost to his lips.

The succubus sighed. “Oh, he knows, he _knows_.”

Giles didn’t really know – but he felt. Felt the sharpness of the crystal’s facets, felt the power of a hundred hundred pasts, felt old blood rise. There was magic here indeed, the kind he’d once loved. Another trap, perhaps, but it seemed like a return of something longed for, rather than an attack.

Gently, as if blowing dust off a favourite library book, he released a breath.

The crystal glowed all colours, blue red green orange purple. From unseen speakers music came. Yes, the tune was familiar…

“’Tumbling Dice’?” McDonald said, and laughed, and looked suddenly happy and altogether a different man.

Without further speech Giles and McDonald each took a microphone, listened, nodded, and then began to sing.

The harmony was there without having to think about it. Their voices just worked, that was all. The joy of it made Giles forget for a moment why he was there, what he was trying to find, what losses and failures he still carried. 

The club quieted as they sang. The magic of their accompaniment grew louder, sweeter. 

But when he and McDonald got to the lines “I’m a rank outsider, you can be my partner in crime,” without warning the Bulgarian vampire snarled something incomprehensible and flipped over the table.

Rupert Giles might have spent the past few years as a librarian, but the man who had been Ripper fucking knew when a bar fight was about to happen.

Worse, McDonald’s dagger and The Two Marks of Hell were all too unprotected. Never a good idea to let others touch one’s weapons.

He and McDonald glanced at each other, read each other’s understanding, and leapt off the stage at the same time. 

The succubus wailed, “My crystal!”

Giles turned, said politely, “Thank you, er, miss,” and heaved it at her with the aim that had made him the pride of his school cricket team. He didn’t wait to see if she caught it. He was too busy dodging the most disgusting of the antlers.

When he and McDonald got to the table, Giles took the book. The smell of brimstone acted almost like a shield – the two vampires in full game face battling each other stepped to one side, and the Visick-demon bouncer gestured them to the door.

Of course, Giles thought, the very sharp dagger McDonald was wielding in a very professional manner might also have had something to do with their safety.

They stumbled out of the club into the cool Hollywood night. The door slammed behind them, cutting off the bar-fight noise as sharp as any sword.

“Well, then,” McDonald said, only a little breathless. “That was a good time.” 

“Indeed,” Giles said, slightly (a lot) more breathless. “Indeed.”

“And you got your hands on the book after all,” McDonald said. 

Giles looked at the volume. “It seems I have.”

McDonald hesitated – which seemed odd. “Guess that means you keep it.”

“Not to be rude, but er, I don’t exactly trust such a gift.”

“No flies on you, buddy.” McDonald’s sneer seemed half-hearted, somehow. “But I learned a couple things tonight from the singing. That little book can be your payment.”

Giles wanted to protest further – it was unconscionable to treat a valuable text this casually – but the spirit of acquisition was too strong. (He could give it back to the Clark Library later, after he was done. Maybe.) So all he said was “I appreciate it, McDonald.”

A rattlesnake smile from McDonald at that, and “You think that’s all it takes?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do,” Giles said, and it was in his old voice. “Because I learned some things from the singing, too.”

The Two Unicorns sign fluttered and hummed, louder than the nearby traffic, louder than their silence.

“Yeah,” McDonald echoed. “From one rank outsider to another.” 

They didn’t smile then. The truth was too cold, there in that California night. But they nodded at each other, and Giles, book tucked underneath his arm, turned on his heel and headed for his car.

Sunnydale was waiting, although he wasn’t sure what he’d do when he got back. Other than writing the monograph, of course – but that wouldn’t take long.

And he absently began singing under his breath the rest of the song, “’Baby I can’t stay….’”


End file.
